The Viking Horn Spell

by Amanda Hartford

  I’d had situations like this before, and they’d made me wary. Magical objects can be very dangerous. That dollar bill I paid when I signed the courier’s clipboard technically gave me ownership of the object while it was in my care, but that doesn’t always mean that I get full control. A magical object is like a used car: you never know what crazy stuff the previous owner has done to it. There could be layers of spells, incantations, and charms on it, and there’s no way to know how competent the witch was who worked that magic. The thing could quite literally blow up in my face.

  The drinking horn had been pawned for safekeeping years ago to my distant cousins in France. I was supposed to hold it as collateral for a New York business deal, which was why the Paris shop had shipped it to me.

  It wasn’t like them to allow sloppy paperwork. I checked my watch. The time difference was in my favor: Paris was open for business.

  “Amélie?” I asked when my eldest cousin answered the phone. We’ve never met face-to-face, but we are the fourth generation to run our respective businesses, and I know her well.

  “Maggie! Hello!” Amélie was a morning person, always cheerful to the point of being annoying. “Did your package arrive safely?”

  I assured her that the shipment was just fine. “It’s just a problem with the form,” I assured her. “There’s no information about its powers.”

  I heard her snicker. “That’s because it has none.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The owner is...” she paused, searching for a tactful answer, “...developing his talents. He purchased this piece through a regular antiquities auction — maybe ten years ago? — as a way to begin. The drinking horn is a blank slate.”

  “So it’s never had any magic assigned to it?”

  “Gabrielle says not.” Gabrielle was Amélie’s ancient great-grandmother and the head of the family in France. I was inclined to take her word for it. “We kept it here under a house ward so it wouldn’t pick up any bad habits from the other objects until the owner was ready for it. Why? Is it acting up?”

  “No, everything’s fine,” I assured her again. “It’s just, better safe than sorry, you know? By the way: do you happen to know if the owner is planning to have me ship the horn back to you when he finishes his deal?”

  “Sorry, I have no idea. Monsieur Swensen’s New York number is on the file. You might want to give him a call?”

  I certainly would. Gabrielle’s opinion notwithstanding, having a magical object with unknown powers in my basement made me decidedly nervous.

  I dialed the owner’s stateside contact number, but it rang to voicemail. I left him a terse but polite message: “Mr. Swensen, this is Maggie Flournoy at Pentacle Pawn Scottsdale. I’ve received your package, but the paperwork is incomplete. Please call me at your earliest convenience, and no later than midnight tomorrow night.” I tried to sound friendly when I added my usual tagline. “I hope to hear from you soon!”

  ♦

  I’d asked my friends Barry and Mark to join me for a late supper at the shop. I always enjoy listening to them bounce off of each other’s personalities, but this night I also had an ulterior motive: I wanted them to be there the first time I took the Viking horn out of its case. I guaranteed their appearance by ordering Italian take-out from their favorite restaurant around the corner.

  Barry and Mark hang out together a lot — probably because they have absolutely nothing in common. Mark Corcoran is my closest friend. We met when we were both teaching college in New Orleans. I was a newly-minted physics professor; Mark was supposed to be teaching undergraduate English, but he spent most of his time traveling around the world, joyously ferreting out obscure books in ancient libraries.

  The university pink-slipped both of us at about the same time. I scraped together enough money to set up Pentacle Pawn Scottsdale. Mark writes steamy romance novels that pay for his house on the beach in Malibu.

  Barry is, well, Barry. He’s a little bantam rooster from South Texas who will take on guys three times his size for a noble cause. Truth is: Barry Alexander doesn’t need a cause; he’s always up for a good fight. He wears a pink feather in the band of his Stetson, just to see if somebody will make a crack about it. You get the picture.

  By the time Barry and Mark arrived, I had our dinner sent out on the big oak table that I use to sign contracts with clients. We hadn’t been together for a few months, so we caught up while we munched.

  Mark had been traveling in Europe, researching his latest best-selling billionaire romance series. This one was set on the Italian coast, and I realized that each city where his steamy stories took place not only contained a lovely yacht harbor; each one also boasted a medieval monastery or library. Mark was using his business travel to indulge his passion for ancient manuscripts.

  Barry had been on the road for months, too, but he was taking a week off from the rodeo circuit to heal up a little after a particularly nasty (and short) ride on a massive Brahma bull. He was stiff, sore, and broke.

  “So,” Mark asked him, “how much longer are you going to try to keep this up?”

  Barry shrugged. “Rodeo is all I know to do. I guess I’ll do it till I can’t do it no more.”

  Mark and I were both concerned. Barry had to be on the wrong side of forty by now, in a profession dominated by 20-year-olds. No way was this going to have a happy ending.

  “And what then?” I asked.

  Barry shrugged again and pushed his fork around in his pasta. “I have a little money put back from the good years. It’s not enough to retire on, but last winter I bought a little place up in Wyoming out of a bank foreclosure sale. The house is more like a shack, but it’s on a nice piece of land. I figure I can build it up some, maybe even get off the circuit and go work it one of these days.”

  Mark and I were astonished. This was the closest to a plan we had ever heard from Barry.

  “Good for you!” Mark shouted. He clapped Barry so hard on the back that the little cowboy pitched forward in his chair.

  Barry grinned shyly under his massive hat. “It isn’t much, but it’s mine. You’re welcome, both of you — you come visit anytime.”

  We had plowed through the pasta while we talked, so Mark cleared the table while I retrieved our desserts from the apartment sized refrigerator in the break room.

  “Get started, guys — I’ll be right back,” I told them. I sat in the Eames chair in front of my desk, recited a short incantation in my head and popped into the basement.

  Just as my building is divided into the normal retail operation in the front and my specialty shop for magical objects in the rear, so, too, is the basement divided by a solid concrete block wall that splits the space into front and back. There is no way to get to the back half of the basement from the front; from either side, there’s nothing to give you a clue that the other half exists.

  Bronwyn has a staircase to take her down into the front basement storage area. She keeps a huge safe down there, and only she and I know the combination. The safe is built into the massive wall that I had installed when I bought the building.

  Getting downstairs from the alley shop is a bit trickier: there are no stairs. The Eames chair at my desk — and the one that exactly matches it down in the basement — serve as a sort of elevator. Say the magic words, and you disappear from one chair and appear in the other.

  I picked up the leather case that held the Viking horn and popped back upstairs.

  I’m not sure what the boys expected, but it wasn’t a trombone case. Mark pushed back from his take-out tiramisu and came to look over my shoulder.

  I unsnapped the latches and opened the case. The beautiful Viking drinking horn gleamed in the lamplight. I ran my thumb along the silver ring that protected the edge of the horn’s mouth. It was chased with magical symbols.

  “This could be a powerful finder,” I said, turning to Mark. “What do you guys think?”

  Barry isn’t afraid of much of anything in the ordinary world, but
he stayed right where he was. He’d been around magical objects enough to know that things are seldom what they seem to be at first glance. And, unlike Mark’s confident hand, Barry’s own magic skills were a little erratic. He concentrated on his dessert.

  Mark squinted at the horn and nodded. He looked concerned. “Is it stable?”

  “That’s what I need to find out,” I said. “Want to help me?”

  ♦

  Magical objects come in two flavors: finders and binders. The finders retain the memory of the plant or animal from which the object was made, and can be used to summon the creature itself. Some witches keep amulets containing mementos of their childhood cats — a tuft of fur, perhaps, braided in the way Victorians kept souvenirs of their lost loved ones’ hair — and they call on their former familiars for comfort in times of stress. But finders aren’t always benign. We’d recently had a nasty encounter in our basement vault with a maliciously materialized tiger, and I wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience.

  Binders are more subtle; they carry the aura of the creature, and the owner of the object can concentrate and redirect that power. Binders are more directly dangerous, but all magical objects demand respect.

  Only the rightful owner can invoke the magic of either a finder or a binder, but objects sometimes retain fragments of old spells, and I need to magically cleanse them before they are safe to handle. The dollar bill that I had given to the courier firmly placed the horn in my possession, but I would spend a little time with it later that evening just to be sure that it understood the rules.

  Mark slid his middle finger through the brass ring and held the horn up as if he was drinking from it. “Good balance,” he said to himself. “It’s functional. So, what’s the story?”

  “The owner claims it’s Viking.”

  Mark shook his head. “Doesn’t look right. The horn itself might be that old, but the silver fittings are later, I think. Is it for sale?”

  “No, it’s just here as collateral on a real estate transaction,” I said. “We’re supposed to store it until the deal goes through.”

  Mark pulled the sheaf of paperwork out of the manila envelope. He looked thoughtful. “All this seems a little vague,” he said, flipping through the papers. “You may want to delve a little deeper.”

  My antenna went up. “Is there a problem?”

  “This item may be... mislabeled,” Mark said.

  “It’s a Texas Longhorn,” Barry said smugly. As a rodeo cowboy, he considered himself an expert.

  I thought I saw a small smile on Mark’s usually stern face. “Have you ever seen Longhorn with a curve like that?”

  I glanced at Barry. He didn’t answer. If it wasn’t a Longhorn, then what the heck was this? He looked a little pale.

  “Besides,” Mark said, “these fittings are European, and they’re old — really old. And, if I’m correct, that’s an auroch horn,” Mark said. “Alive, this guy was 2,000 pounds, almost seven feet tall at the shoulder. This is the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

  Barry whistled.

  “Be happy that they’ve been extinct for 400 years,” Mark said. “They were ancestors of your modern European cattle, but they weren’t domesticated. They ran wild in same-sex herds. You’d be working out in the middle of your field, and this guy and a herd of his brother bulls would charge out of the forest right at you. They’d chase you off and eat your crops right down to the dirt.”

  I had a sudden image of an auroch loose downstairs in my vault. A bull in a china shop, indeed. Mark was right — I needed to find out more about the drinking horn.

  “So it’s a caveman Longhorn,” Barry said, grinning.

  “Actually, you’re not far off. These are the animals you see in Paleolithic cave paintings,” Mark said almost reverently.

  “So, how old is this, really?” I asked Mark.

  “Late Anglo-Saxon, maybe? There are horns like this in the British Museum from the Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk, but it could be a lot later.” He glanced at me. “May I?”

  I nodded, and Mark lifted the drinking horn from its case. “The very last auroch that ever lived died in the early 1600s in a royal forest preserve in Eastern Europe.” He hefted the drinking horn. “If this is really auroch, you have something extraordinary here.”

  Barry rolled his eyes at Mark. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I read,” Mark said, shooting Barry the look that had terrified a generation of freshmen.

  Barry ignored the barb. “So, is it dangerous?” he asked.

  Mark passed his hands over the horn. “I’m not getting anything at all.” He turned to me. “You?”

  “Nothing. The story is that this belongs to someone who is just beginning to develop his powers, and he wanted an object that he could try to put his own mark on.”

  I noticed that Barry wasn’t saying much, so I turned to him. “What do you think?”

  He reached out cautiously and ran his fingers along the exposed surface of the horn, being careful not to touch the silver fittings. “It’s warm,” Barry said, “but that’s all I’m getting.” The look on his face said there was something more, but he wasn’t ready to share.

  Mark placed his own fingers on the horn and shook his head. “I’m not even getting that much. I think you’re good to go.”

  Neither Mark nor Barry could see what I saw: the horn was glowing. Not the whole thing — the silver fittings looked perfectly normal, but the air around the horn itself had started to glow in all the colors of the rainbow, like sunlight streaming through a prism.

  It had started to glow as soon as Barry passed his hands over it.

  I’ve been able to see auras ever since I was a little girl, and my aunt Daisy has helped me understand what the colors mean. Mark’s aura is always precisely the same: a deep gold that indicates his love of learning and intellectual curiosity. Daisy tells me that my own aura is dark red, passionate and grounded to the earth.

  The horn’s rainbow display was the same as I had seen in very young children. It indicated a young soul. Those who believe in reincarnation say the rainbow aura indicates the soul’s first trip to the earth. Barry had one, too.

  I closed the case and took it back downstairs while the guys polished off their desserts and cleared the dishes. I still wasn’t confident that the horn had no enchantments, but at least it seemed stable enough to spend the night down in the vault while I figured it out. At least, I hoped so.

  ♦

  Mark had picked up a bottle of excellent Scotch somewhere in his travels, so it was nearly 3 a.m. when the boys headed home.

  It was time for me to have a chat with the Viking horn.

  The horn’s rainbow aura meant that it was inexperienced. It also meant that it could be volatile. Barry’s multicolor glow changed with his moods, and I had to assume that it was the same for the horn. I needed to be careful with this one.

  When I work with a new object, it’s a little like taking a dog to obedience school for the first time. There’s just no way to tell how it will respond. Some objects are immediately compliant, and it only takes a couple of sessions before I’m in complete control. Others take a lot more work.

  I took the drinking horn from its case and placed it on my desk. It lay still, glowing softly. I didn’t want to spook it, so I moved slowly, cupping my hands on either side of the mouth, holding my fingers six inches away without actually touching the piece. Its aura diminished a little both in size and luminosity. That was a good sign. The drinking horn was open to training.

  The next step was to get the leash on it. This part did not involve an incantation. It was simply a force of will: me, applying my power, my control, to the drinking horn. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. If it doesn’t, the results can be spectacular. Think of a missile leaving the pad or a pitbull snapping its rope.

  Here goes nothing, I thought as I gripped my hands around the open end of the drinking horn.

  I was surprised. I expected the horn to fe
el like old wood. Instead, the surface was smooth and a bit oily, like my thumbnail. Was I feeling the warmth that Barry had felt, or was it just my own hand reflected back to me? I wasn’t sure, but I understood that this was not some dead thing. The auroch horn had never been trained, but it was clearly aware — and it was powerful.

  I needed to get a ward on it, right now. A ward is a special piece of magic, sort of a supernatural fence or container. A ward can keep things in, or it can keep things out.

  There are many ways to create a ward, from simple spells to elaborate drawings and sigils. I have a quick, all-purpose spell that I like to use for new objects in the vault. It’s part of the larger incantation that shields the vault in the way that a concrete casing keeps radioactive gases from escaping from a nuclear reactor. I suspect Scottsdale’s city fathers would not be pleased if all the energy contained in Pentacle Pawn’s vault happened to be released at one time. It’s like I told Amélie: better safe than sorry.

  My little spell doesn’t directly affect the object. It’s more like wrapping it in a protective blanket. The spell sounds like the first verse of a children’s nursery rhyme. That’s intentional. If I ever have to use it when I’m out in the world, anybody who is eavesdropping might think I’m a bit strange for singing a children’s song to myself, but they won’t suspect that I’m, well, a witch.

  I kept my voice low as I cradled the horn like a baby and sang to it.

  Gently come and gently keep

  To your cradle, off to sleep

  Moon and stars with you abide

  Safely stayed ‘til morningtide

  The horn seemed to enjoy the lullaby. The purple bands in its aura deepened to a deep plum color. That was a good sign. It meant that the horn was aware of me but not afraid. If it had been frightened of me, I’d have seen the bright orange glow of a flame — and, if I persisted, the flame itself.

  The drinking horn was tolerating me as well as could be expected. I quickly finished the ward as I stroked the horn along its length, murmuring words of praise. The horn’s aura faded back to a soft rainbow glow.